From the 1940s through the 1970s, Lon Tinkle was a brilliant presence in the Texas Institute of Letters as well as on the Texas and Southwestern literary scene. It’s no stretch to say the national literary scene, too.

He was a fifth-generation Texan whose ancestor fought at the Alamo; he was born in Oak Cliff in 1906 and earned two degrees on the north side of town at Southern Methodist University; he was a longtime book editor and critic at The Dallas Morning News;hewas a master teacher at SMU of French literature and cultural studies; he was a mentor to me and many others at SMU; and he was an elegant Francophile whose studies at the Sorbonne in Paris never seemed far away from his distinctive personality.

His primary forum to the general public and to intellectuals alike was on the books page of TheNews. His importance was that he understood the tradition of Texas and its writing with all its elements of frontier myth and its hard reality.

“We celebrate not a region but the artist in our midst,” he stressed. That was his answer to the oft-discussed dilemma of whether the Texas Institute of Letters should emphasize authors’ works concerning Texas in some way or writers who had significant ties to Texas, no matter their subject.

Upon Julien Lon Tinkle’s death in 1980, the council of the TIL instituted the annual Lon Tinkle Award to honor a member who had made significant literary contributions, including service to the institute. The roster of those so honored each year at TIL’s annual spring meeting includes names such as Tom Lea (the first honoree), John Graves, Larry McMurtry, Shelby Hearon, Horton Foote, Cormac McCarthy, William H. Goetzmann, T.R. Fehrenbach, Bill Witliff, Carolyn Osborn, David Weber and Larry L. King.

Tinkle, whose flowing white hair (in his later years) and fine mustache resembled those of Mark Twain, was, of course, a noted author himself. His vivid account of the Alamo, titled Thirteen Days to Glory: The Siege of the Alamo (1958), prompted John Wayne to hire him as a historical adviser for his film about the battle. Tinkle’s excellent biographies include Mr. De: A Biography of Everette Lee DeGolyer (1970) and An American Original: The Life of J. Frank Dobie (1978). His homage to his home city of Dallas came in a book titled The Key to Dallas (1965).

At his house (designed by O’Neil Ford) on Amherst Street in Dallas, there was a graceful cypress tree that Tinkle had planted and under which he liked to sit and discuss books and ideas. Those who enjoyed his company on those occasions or who knew him under any circumstances retain an uncommonly vivid impression of him. He had a storehouse of anecdotes concerning his relations with the nation’s most famous authors. And this erudite individual spoke always precisely and distinctively with an accent that, like the man himself, was bounded by no geographical place.

Tinkle’s wit was as sharp as his extensive knowledge of literature, and delivered with sly understatement. He loved to tell his students of his days in Paris, tracking the paths of American writers of that period. “When I visited Gertrude Stein,” he began one of his stories, “she told me that a little bell rang in her head each time she met a writer of genius, and she had heard that bell only three times. The first time was when she met Hemingway. The second when she met Scott Fitzgerald … and the third, when she met Lon Tinkle.” And then he smiled, wryly.

But Tinkle, indeed, knew several of those émigré American writers. He told of a 1938 visit to Paris when he entered a favorite cafe and happened upon novelist Theodore Dreiser in an argument with a waiter. Dreiser, who spoke no French, wanted a glass of gin tainted with only a breath of vermouth. The waiter, who spoke little English, insisted on a milder martini, with Martini & Rossi vermouth and, perhaps, ice. Tinkle, fluent in French, came to the writer’s rescue and secured the drink as Dreiser wanted it. The grateful American invited Tinkle to an international writers conference where he introduced the young Dallasite to literary giants such as Thomas Mann and T.S. Eliot, with whom he formed friendships.

It was in part due to his friendship with Tinkle that Eliot paid his first visit to Texas in April 1958, giving lectures at the University of Texas at Austin and SMU. Tinkle was in the delegation that welcomed the famous poet when he arrived at Dallas Love Field and attended him during his visit. Eliot’s appearance at SMU Coliseum on Friday night, April 25, 1958, drew a capacity audience of 9,000, which delighted Tinkle.

Marshall Terry spent more than 60 years affiliated with SMU as student, administrator and faculty member, and he is the author of a dozen books. He is a past president of the Texas Institute of Letters and a TIL fellow, and he won TIL’s Lon Tinkle Award in 1990.